Machiavelli: the first modern definition of corruption

The translation to the spanish of the Historie Fiorentine of Nicolas Machiavelli (1525), it represents a magnifcent opportunity to think about a forgotten work of the secretary Florentine, fundamental in the author and of a enormous transcendency in the later thought of Montesquieu, Rousseau and Constant. Machiavelli contributes with three key ideas. First, an idea of History considered as a human instrumental fact for the knowledge of the Politics, articulated from the categories of ascent and decrease (progress and decline) of the nations, that though taken from Polibio, nothing have to do with the closed circle of the greek. Second, the Decline or decadence is conceived as a phenomenon associated with the corruption, understood in turn, as a sociological collective process of degradution of the regulation, in which ''the one that leaves what he does for what he must do, runs to the ruin instead of being a benefit''. Third, Florencia's History is for Machiavelli the example of what it is not necessary to do: an anti-example. Florence was not free because it was corrupt in the interior (civic) and in the exterior (military), and it prevented itself from practising a self-government basad on the implication of an in the civic lite.